He just is not good with beards and doesn’t know what to do so it all looks fake.

After reading the interview with this foreign born A list singer, I think he came across as a guy who wants to come out of the closet, but doesn't know how because his team wants him to do one thing and his heart is telling him another. He just is not good with beards and doesn't know what to do so it all looks fake. His team needs to realize that.

After reading the interview with this foreign born A list singer, I think he came across as a guy who wants to come out of the closet, but doesn’t know how because his team wants him to do one thing and his heart is telling him another.

He just is not good with beards and doesn’t know what to do so it all looks fake.

People have been making quite a lot of Shawn Mendes’ new Rolling Stone cover story, in which he semi-confirmed his Hailey Baldwin fling (“a zone of limbo”), gently rocked his Disney-Prince-Charming image by admitting he loves weed, and generally revealed that he is one huge perfectly-coiffed, angel-voiced ball of anxiety.

What was most notable about his interview however, was how genuinely candid — like, Lena Dunham candid, for better or worse — Mendes appears to have been with his interviewer.

The profile opens with an anecdote about Mendes’ admitting and rebuking himself for feelings of jealousy of other stars, and fear about sustaining his relevance.

“He kept seeing Top 40 A-listers with their partners — maybe it was Dua Lipa and her boyfriend, or Justin Bieber and his model-fiancée — and he was starting to get a little jealous. “I had this thought: ‘I have to get paparazzied with someone. Who am I gonna get? I’m not relevant,’ Mendes recalls. But he gave up on the idea just as quickly. “I was like, ‘Ugh, you fucking idiot. Why did you think that?'”

In the age of endless confession, Mendes’ stands out. Celebs will talk for thousands of words about their struggles, but usually from the standpoint of victory, instead of smack in the middle of an unflattering moment of self-doubt. As the New York Times’ Jon Caramanica argued in his viral “R.I.P., The Celebrity Profile” piece, substantial interviews have largely been replaced by “either outright silence, or more often, unidirectional narratives offered through social media. Monologue, not dialogue.”

Later in the Rolling Stone profile, igniting its most widely circulating soundbite, Mendes did it again: speaking with unpleasant honesty about how the viral rumors that he’s gay have affected him, and forced him to confront his own ingrained homophobia.

He described how, even though he knows exactly why they shouldn’t based on the rules of wokeness, the rumors have caused him to intentionally police his own gender performance.

“Mendes often finds himself watching his own interviews, analyzing his voice and his body language. He’ll see an anonymous stranger comment on the way he crossed his legs once and try not to do it again. He pulls out his phone to show me his Twitter account — his name is the only recent search.

‘In the back of my heart, I feel like I need to go be seen with someone — like a girl — in public, to prove to people that I’m not gay,’ he says. ‘Even though in my heart I know that it’s not a bad thing. There’s still a piece of me that thinks that. And I hate that side of me.'”- Source